Pink Chaddi Campaing, India

5 May 2009

On Saturday, January 24, about 40 members of the SRS waded into a bar in Mangalore, a college town in the same state as Bangalore, Karnataka, and beat up every woman they could see. Screaming abuse and smashing the place up, they chased the women into the street, pulling their hair and shoving them to the ground. “We are the custodians of Indian culture,” declared Pramod Mutalik, the unrepentant founder of the Ram Sena (SRS), the Lord Ram’s Army, which is a violent band of Hindu extremists who want to stamp out degenerate Western behavior. In response to this situation, Nisha Susan, a 29-year-old journalist, was sitting at home raging at another assault. Two thugs had hit one of her friends in the street. She decided to launch a protest group on Facebook. Two minutes later the Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women had its first members. When Susan woke up the next day, it had 500 members. “Then it went into the thousands,” she says, “then we were getting calls from Bihar, from Calcutta, from people who wanted to join.”